Thursday, April 10, 2014

I’ve been thinking about work lately. I’m not just thinking
about work in the sense of thinking about my job. Rather, I’ve been thinking
about work in the big picture perspective.

This is the
time of year when work is on the minds of young people about to graduate from
college. They are gearing up for final projects and exams, but also
interviewing for jobs. They are excited and nervous about making the transition
from student to full-time employee. Some of them have jobs as college students,
of course. But now they like to talk about getting that first ‘career’ job.

I would
agree that it is exciting. No doubt a good job in the field that one has
studied is a worthy reward for the effort put into a college degree. But in
listening to some students talk, I get a little uneasy feeling too. They focus
on how much they will get paid. They talk about the benefits and how much
vacation they’ll have. They carry on about whether their job will be something
fun for them to do or drudgery.

It’s hard
to tell them not to think about such things. But I want to encourage them to
think about something more. I want them to think about what “work” really is.
And it really is about more than a job, a way to pay the bills, or an extension
of one’s personal identity.

More than a
dozen years ago my father-in-law gave me a book written by a friend of his.
“Work: The Meaning of Your Life. A Christian Perspective” is written by Lester
DeKoster, a former college librarian and professor of speech and also a
magazine editor and author of several other books. He sets the course for his
brief little book by defining work simply yet profoundly. As he says, “work is
the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.”

That’s what
was in the back of my head recently as I overheard all the talk about work. I
wanted to hear a little less about salary, job description, and benefits. I
wanted to hear young people talk with some excitement about whom they would
serve, and how.

Meanwhile,
the faculty where I teach have been talking in the past semester about service.
For those outside of higher education, I should explain that when professors
are reviewed for tenure and promotion—and indeed beyond that—they are evaluated
in three categories: teaching, research, and service.

Across the
country it’s the same. Professors are expected to teach well and engage in some
form of scholarship. But they also are expected to do something called
“service.” What this means is administrative work, such as chairing committees,
advising students, and a number of other things that wouldn’t fall under
teaching and research. In some sense, based on the definition of work above, I
would say everything is service. But on university campuses there is this
unique distinction.

The issue
recently has been that a few faculty members seem to do the bulk of this
service work while others do very little. People were speaking up and wanting
some equity. The implication is that some faculty members focus on teaching and
research and leave the service largely to others.

This is not
unique to higher education. There are tasks in any occupation that need doing,
and there are people who tend to do those tasks and others who say “that’s not
my job.” Of course, this problem would go away if people would see work as a
way of being useful to others.

It’s
interesting to me to regard a lot of retired people I know. Many of them do not
have a regular job with a salary. But they still work. They volunteer in formal
and informal ways. They actually say it: “I just want to make myself useful.”

I admire
that. And I need to apply that now, well before I retire. Instead of looking at
my own agenda and to-do list and seeing everything else as an interruption, I
could take a lesson from the book I received years ago and look at everything I
do at work in the light of how I am being useful to others.

There’s
an old expression that if you do what you love you’ll never work another day in
your life. It’s possible to amend that by saying that if you see work as a way
to be useful to others you’ll probably satisfy yourself.